“But you are so social!” he said in surprise during dinner last week when I mentioned my strong desire for solitude. We were having dinner with old friends whom I’ve known for nearly 20 years.
I inherited these friends as part of the package when I got together with Rich, and they accepted me graciously. We’d see them several times a year, always in the context of dinner parties. At those parties I was shy at first, being the youngest guest by about two decades and surreptitiously scrutinized second wife to a much older man, not to mention a college drop-out with no firm command of the English language. I was working a minimum-wage retail job while they were doctors, teachers, accountants, and lawyers. After a few years I found a way to fit in: by being engaging, asking lots of questions, and smiling a lot. (It also helped that I went back to school, finished school and got a “real” job.)
I must have fooled them, because when I told our friends over dinner last week that I always need alone-time to recharge after social engagements, our friend was most surprised. He had no idea that I’m an introvert, because I appeared to him as if I was in my element at these parties; as if the socializing itself was the relaxation part. While it can be enjoyable, it will almost always drain my battery. I like hanging out with my friends, but what I love best is looking back at the time we spent together from the comfort of my solitude. Does that make sense?
Being an active participant of conversations and at parties is often exhausting to me. There’s only a handful of people whose company I find energizing - the rest I might love, but I need to schedule them with care to prevent social fatigue.
If I were to be given the option an hour before leaving the house to stay in without anyone being upset, you better believe that I’d take that option 9 out of 10 times! But that’s not the world we live in, so I needed to learn to adapt.
There’s a Japanese saying about people having three faces:
You show the first face to the world, the second to your close friends and family, and the third face you never show anyone. It is the truest reflection of who you are.
I think about that a lot, especially about the third face. In my mind the third face is closely connected to shame, and to everything we don’t like about ourselves. To anyone who is struggling - or has struggled - with substance abuse, addiction, an eating disorder, abuse, fears surrounding their sexuality, an identity crisis, dark family secrets, or (insert anything else that’s heavy or makes you feel ashamed), the third face is our dirty secret. We’ll try anything to distance ourselves from it, to pretend that the real version of us are faces one and two. I don’t know if the goal is to become so authentic that you will only have one face - but I know from experience that the less the faces resemble each other, the more painful it is for us.
My first face is that I’ve been trying to hide my mental illness for most of my life. The mask I put on was that of a “normal” person: I’m fine, nothing to see here, I’m just like you. I was smiling on the outside while the inside was dark. Once I couldn’t hide it any longer and started to take medication, my new mask was that I told myself that I used to have depression, but now I was healed and so much better for it. Denial was the name of my game, but I was unaware of it. People who knew my second face weren’t that lucky: my husband and family were exposed to my terrible mood swings, frequent tears, and irrational fears. They have witnessed more ugliness than I wanted them to, but wearing the mask of the first face gets heavy, and I had to put it down once I was home.
But my third face was the one that truly scared me. It was one I didn’t recognize anymore, because I was hiding from myself. It was fear, self-loathing, and self-medication to the point that I was in danger of slowly sliding into addiction. Was that supposed to be the truest reflection of me? Did I really give my best to the world, the leftovers to my loved ones, and reserved the worst for myself?
I’ve written the above in the past tense, because here’s the good news: things have gotten a lot better. Quitting drinking has been a huge, immensely positive change in my life. It’s changed my third face significantly: gone are the crippling shame and self-loathing. Gone are the denial about my mental illness and all the pretense that goes with it. And gone is the severe fear about the future.
Living alcohol-free doesn’t mean the end of the struggle, of course. But it means that I no longer shrink away from what I see when I’m alone with myself. Reducing the distance between the three faces will be a life-long challenge - but removing a mind-altering substance from the equation has been an essential first step.
I always struggle about how I can translate my experience into a helpful tool for you. I kind of hate when people say “I have done it, so you can too”, because it’s just not true. We are all made differently, with different talents, gifts, challenges, gene pools and circumstances. But I do know that stories have power, and I’ve been saved by other peoples’ stories countless times. That’s why I’m sharing mine: in the hopes that it may reach a person who needs to read about someone else’s struggles, successes, and failures.
Before I go, here are a couple of things that have made me happy lately:
The podcast Maintenance Phase. I’ve listened to every single one of the 54 episodes, because the hosts Aubrey Gordon and Michael Hobbes have an incredible knack for educating you in a fun, entertaining way. They debunk past and current wellness and diet trends in an informative, mind-blowing way. I highly recommend them!
Taylor Tomlinson’s Instagram and her specials. Watching Look at You has transformed my personal relationship with my mental illness and made me truly accept it. She’s the GOAT!
Reader comments. I love and treasure every email, message and comment I get from you guys. You are amazing!
The show Call the Midwife. It’s set in the 1950s and 60s in Poplar, a poor area of London, and follows a diverse group of midwives. It has everything: love, loss, life, death, friendship, nuns, prostitutes, babies galore, and little bits of priceless life advice. It’s my all-time favourite, feel-good show; you can watch it on BritBox (on Prime).
Have a happy Halloween!
xo Miriam